Women's Organisations and Female Activists in the Aftermath of War: International Perspectives 1918-1923

现代战争的社会和文化史的最新发展，大大有助于人们重新认识第一次世界大战的经历，特别是这一经历是如何在大众文化和高雅文化中传播的，以及1918年之后的纪念和纪念活动。最重要的是，新史学已经将重点从仅仅以高层政治和战略为中心的叙述转移，并对战争随着1918年11月军事敌对行动的停止而结束的观点提出了挑战。事实上，在西线以外，战争还在继续，因为难民和战俘遣返问题上的冲突;中欧部分地区的革命和反革命暴力;在这种情况下，有组织的妇女运动和妇女活动家在战后时期的作用具有新的重要性，特别是从跨国和比较的角度来看。两个关于有组织的妇女运动对战争爆发、持续时间和后果的反应的国际会议，由调查人员于2005年和2008年组织，后来被编辑成两卷论文，确定了一个独特的、重点明确的调查领域，并在一个渴望推进该项目的非正式国际学者小组之间建立了密切的联系。该小组既高度国际化-来自11个不同国家的研究人员在大约14个国家的妇女组织中工作-又高度跨学科。该小组的国际性质，特别是来自中欧和东欧的大量研究人员的参与，促进了真正的比较工作，历史学家、社会科学家、性别问题专家和文学研究人员采用不同的方法，研究网络计划下的拨款将使这个非正式网络成为一个有凝聚力和可持续的团体，而研讨会的拟议时间表-虽然研究问题将在项目过程中被定义和澄清，但主要的比较主题，如公民身份、选举权、民族主义和妇女对战后时代极端需求（流离失所、拘禁、暴力和饥饿）的反应，将是我们调查的起点。该小组将研究妇女组织和女性活动家在文化复员中的作用，指的是“战时心态和价值观的重建”（约翰·霍恩），这已成为最近国际会议的一个重要主题。2008年12月启动了一个重大研究项目，即“1918-1923年一战后的准军事暴力”：由爱尔兰研究理事会资助的《走向全球视角》主要关注年轻人对战争后果的反应，在这里提供了一个受欢迎的比较点，特别是在理解对去动员和再动员挑战的性别反应方面。该小组还将审查能够跨越国际边界的组织的工作，例如国际妇女争取和平与自由联盟（妇女和自联），以及个人活动家，例如代表战俘及其家属的活动家艾尔莎·布兰德斯特伦和记者埃莉诺·富兰克林埃根，他们报道了整个战后欧洲的社会状况。这些妇女和组织在实现和解和促进前敌对国家之间的合作的作用也将被检查，因为将民族主义妇女组织在保持战争的话语，并在1918年至1923年期间，促进新形式的种族民族主义和种族不容忍的兴起的作用。

Recent developments in the social and cultural history of modern warfare have done much to shed new light on the experience of the First World War, and in particular how that experience was communicated in popular and high culture, and in acts of remembrance and commemoration after 1918. Above all the new historiography has shifted emphasis away from narratives centred on high politics and strategy alone, and has challenged the idea that the war came to an end with the cessation of military hostilities in November 1918. Indeed, away from the western front the war continued through conflicts over the repatriation of refugees and POWs; revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence in parts of central Europe; and new ethnic and national conflicts arising from the collapse of the former Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.Within this context, the role of organised women's movements and female activists in the post-war period takes on a new importance, especially when seen from a transnational and comparative perspective. Two international conferences on the response of the organised women's movement to the outbreak, duration and aftermath of war, organised by the investigators in 2005 and 2008 and later transformed into two edited volumes of essays, have identified a distinctive and clearly focused area of enquiry and established strong links between an informal group of international scholars eager to take the project forward. The group is both highly international - researchers from eleven different nations working on the women's organisations within some fourteen nations - and highly interdisciplinary. The international nature of the group and especially the involvement of a significant number of researchers from central and eastern Europe facilitates genuine comparative work which will also be enhanced by the different methodological approaches of the historians, social scientists, gender specialists and researchers into literature, culture and film.Funding under the Research Network scheme would enable this informal network to become a cohesive and sustainable group and the proposed schedule of workshop-style meetings would allow it to make rapid progress in knowledge and understanding.Although the research questions will be defined and clarified during the course of the project, major comparative themes such as citizenship, suffrage, nationalism, and women's desire to respond to extremes of need in the post-war era (dislocation, internment, violence and hunger) will be the starting point of our investigation. The group will examine the role of women's organisations and female activists in cultural demobilisation, referring to the 'dismantlement of the mindsets and values of wartime' (John Horne), which has become a major theme in recent international conferences. The launch in December 2008 of a major research project, Paramilitary Violence After the Great War, 1918-1923: Towards a Global Perspective, funded by the Irish Research Council and focusing largely on the response of younger men to the aftermath of the war, provides a welcome point of comparison here, especially in relation to understanding gendered responses to the challenges of de- and remobilisation.The group will also examine the work of organisations which were able to move across international borders, such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and individual activists such as the campaigner on behalf of prisoners of war and their families, Elsa Brändström, and the journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan, who reported on the social conditions throughout post-war Europe. The role of such women and organisations in bringing about reconciliation and facilitating cooperation between former enemy nations will also be examined, as will the role of nationalist women's organisations in maintaining discourses of war and in facilitating the rise of new forms of ethno-nationalism and racial intolerance during the period 1918-23.